Saturday, March 01, 2008

It doesn't take much to sunder a debate about the Republican Party's inconsequential core. The Rush Limbaugh-led insurrection against John McCain gave the fleeting impression that the movement was on the cusp of such a reckoning. No longer.

In close succession, Romney resigned, and McCain wowed the Conservative Political Action Conference. Behind the scenes, Bill Kristol practiced his curtain calls. Kristol is the uncrowned comeback kid – the attractive, affable neoconservative mastermind has backed McCain's campaign for some time now. Philosophically, Kristol is the king of consistency. Neoconservative all the way. Like McCain. Just as it appeared the neocons were slowly being inched out, they're back.

It's proving well nigh impossible to Kill Bill.

Kristol has been doing the rounds in the media, anointing McCain as the "leader of the conservative movement" – his words. Peggy Noonan, another court courtesan, has been quaking and quivering about McCain on the networks. (Will she pen an ode for McCain's nether reaches as she did for Bush's in "He's Got Two of 'Em"?) It all sounds terribly familiar.

I'll grant McCain this: His speech before the CPAC was a vast improvement on the pathological, unremitting lies of Bush and his spokesmen. "Yes, there were WMD in Iraq; yes, Saddam planned 9/11; yes, he shopped for yellow cake in Niger; yes, democracy is on the march in Iraq; yes, the economy at home is humming; yes, Iranian speedboats attacked U.S. warships" – Bush babble, I believe, is less a consequence of congenital stupidity than it is of the confusion caused by incessant, habitual lying.

McCain came clean. But he chose the objects of his confession carefully, lingering on his opposition to the small-potatoes of agricultural subsidies, rather than on his proposal, as part of the unholy McCain-Kennedy-Specter trinity, to legalize 20 million deadwood illegal immigrants. "God's children," in his words. Be mindful that McCain is not done with amnesty. Following the victory in South Carolina, McCain denied, to Sean Hannity's face, that he had been wrong in his support for amnesty. Now he promises to "address other aspects of the problem," after "securing our borders first." What does that mean? You be the judge.

McCain spoke about beating government back, having just the other day blessed the latest deficit spending, that obscene stimulus package. Moreover, opposing tax cuts once over a long political career could be put down to the ravages of age and an unsupple mind. But, by National Review's count, McCain voted for higher taxes 50 times, often on the grounds that such cuts benefit those who pay the lion's share of the tax burden. McCain's sense of justice matches his understanding of the economy.

McCain's newfound fealty to the free market is suspect. Profits are the street signs of the free market – without profits there'd be no products. But in the course of disparaging Mitt Romney for making it in the private sector – politics, remember, is a form of sheltered employment – McCain badmouthed the thing that makes the free market go around: "I didn't manage for profit, I led for patriotism."

So said the beneficiary of life-long sheltered employment, who couldn't "manage for profit" if he tried. Indeed, his CPAC mention of Edmund Burke notwithstanding, McCain is not very bright. He finished 894th out of 899 at the Naval Academy. He also lost five jets. IQ ace Steve Sailer has suggested that if you're looking for competence in the White House, McCain may not be your man: "To lose one plane over Vietnam may be regarded as a heroic tragedy; to lose five planes here and there looks like carelessness."

"Reaching across the aisle to get things done" – now that's staple McCain Speak; it has been throughout his campaign. It's also a euphemism for relinquishing principles in favor of political expediency. The political animal known as McCain has too often moved in packs dominated by Democrats and other left-liberals. As part of the duo McCain-Feingold, he instated "a federal speech code, enforced with jail terms of up to five years," as Jonathan Rauch noted. As a member of the "Gang of 14," and against constitutionalism, McCain and his homie, Sen. Lindsay Graham, colluded with Democrats in an attempt to sabotage Bush's conservative judicial nominees. Had McCain's minders in the media dug for dirt as diligently as they did on Ron Paul, they'd discover that he voted for hard-core lefties Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer for the Supreme Court. In 2004, McCain considered running on the John Kerry ticket.

Enough said.

A man for all seasons (not), McCain has opposed exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The McCain-Lieberman bill expresses his enthusiasm for the Malthusian environmental monomania – McCain shares the gaseous Al Gore's belief that there is an inherent discord between our system of production and the environment. McCain's contempt for development and consumer freedom "will cost the average U.S. household at least $600 per year by 2010, rising to at least $1,000 per year by 2020," as well as 39,000 jobs in 2010, and at least 190,000 jobs by 2020, in the Heartland Institute's estimation.

The McCain-Lieberman collaboration gave neocon David Brooks and crunchy con Andrew Sullivan goose bumps. Both "fantasized" of launching a McCain-Lieberman Party. With war and global warming on the brain, Sen. Joe Lieberman, a neoconservative by any other name, is firmly behind McCain's candidacy.

From the pollution he has left along his political path McCain can run but cannot hide. Republicans wisely rejected war in Kosovo. McCain, once again, jettisoned party loyalty to call for bombs from above and "more boots on the ground." More recently, it's been "bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb-Iran," and the promise of a 100 year war in Iraq, bound to break that bank he now vows to make solvent. Under the loving gaze of the media, McCain's jingoism is ever evolving.

Fred Barnes, a neoconservative, has dismissed anti-McCain conservatives as "talk-radio mafia." Another McCainiac, Michael Medved, has framed McCain's apparent opposition to the "Fairness Doctrine" as a sign of his man's pure conservatism. A wicked, illiberal effort to control speech and property, the "Fairness Doctrine" is a litmus test not necessarily for a conservative, but for any decent individual, on the left or right. Like Bill Kristol's dad, Medved's ideological trajectory has taken him from the left to the neoconservative left. Unlike the clever Kristol, Medved's shabby argument reveals a less impressive intellectual arc.

Neocon Kristol, over on the op-ed pages of his new editorial home, the New York Times (an appointment that speaks to how cozy the left-neocon cabal truly is), has, excitedly, been admonishing mutinous conservatives, while reciting gory poetry in honor of McCain. Limbaugh he has maligned as suffering from "McCain Derangement Syndrome." (Kristol, however, correctly calls conservatives on their enthusiastic support for the equally problematic candidacy of "Benito" Giuliani.)

Cut to 2000, with Kristol and Brooks making mischief together – or magic, depending on whose side you're on. The two collaborated on a piece, "The Politics of Creative Destruction," in which they argued that McCain would revive, rather than repress, the State. I concur with Stephen Bainbridge when he contends that:

If the Bush era has taught us nothing else, it is that we must be skeptical of interventionist foreign policies whether grounded in the national greatness "conservatism" of a Teddy Roosevelt or the neo-"conservatism" of a Bill Kristol. It produced a foreign policy quagmire that eviscerated any opportunity to advance the conservative agenda at home. ... Importantly when it comes to McCain, his interventionism is fundamentally contrary to the traditions of mainstream conservatism.Back in 2000, McCain's two neocon loyalists lauded him for his unshakable belief in great government, and for resurrecting the promise of "national-greatness conservatism." Given the neocons' "creative destruction" in the interim, the two have been a little less vocal about their aching desires. Their strategic silence makes it easier for McCain to lay claim to the Reagan mantle. He has no business so doing. Contra McCain, Reagan believed the state ought to get out of the way.

Indeed, most illuminating in the McCain CPAC speech was his vow to be "an advocate for the rights of man everywhere in the world." "We can complain about various McCain positions, like McCain-Feingold," Bainbridge observes, "but in a sense those are tactical issues." Agreed: The philosophical significance of McCain lies in his violence-for-values verbiage; in how he deceptively frames the bloodletting in Iraq and elsewhere around the world as the heroic upholding of individual rights. Thanks to the malign McCain, it looked as though the neoconservative whey was finally separating from the conservative curd. What was to remain was not the best concoction, but it promised to be a far cry from the previous accursed ideological amalgam.

I had hoped that, in the dust-up between conservatives and neocon-dominated establishment Republicans, McCain would serve as the curdling bacteria. I was wrong.

In his biography of Barack Obama, David Mendell writes about Obama's life as a "secret smoker" and how he "went to great lengths to conceal the habit." But what about Obama's secret political life? It turns out that Obama's childhood mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, was a communist.

In his books, Obama admits attending "socialist conferences" and coming into contact with Marxist literature. But he ridicules the charge of being a "hard-core academic Marxist," which was made by his colorful and outspoken 2004 U.S. Senate opponent, Republican Alan Keyes.

However, through Frank Marshall Davis, Obama had an admitted relationship with someone who was publicly identified as a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). The record shows that Obama was in Hawaii from 1971-1979, where, at some point in time, he developed a close relationship, almost like a son, with Davis, listening to his "poetry" and getting advice on his career path. But Obama, in his book, Dreams From My Father, refers to him repeatedly as just "Frank."

The reason is apparent: Davis was a known communist who belonged to a party subservient to the Soviet Union. In fact, the 1951 report of the Commission on Subversive Activities to the Legislature of the Territory of Hawaii identified him as a CPUSA member. What's more, anti-communist congressional committees, including the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), accused Davis of involvement in several communist-front organizations.

Trevor Loudon, a New Zealand-based libertarian activist, researcher and blogger, noted evidence that "Frank" was Frank Marshall Davis in a posting in March of 2007.

Obama's communist connection adds to mounting public concern about a candidate who has come out of virtually nowhere, with a brief U.S. Senate legislative record, to become the Democratic Party frontrunner for the U.S. presidency. In the latest Real Clear Politics poll average, Obama beats Republican John McCain by almost four percentage points.

AIM recently disclosed that Obama has well-documented socialist connections, which help explain why he sponsored a "Global Poverty Act" designed to send hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. foreign aid to the rest of the world, in order to meet U.N. demands. The bill has passed the House and a Senate committee, and awaits full Senate action.

But the Communist Party connection through Davis is even more ominous. Decades ago, the CPUSA had tens of thousands of members, some of them covert agents who had penetrated the U.S. Government. It received secret subsidies from the old Soviet Union.

You won't find any of this discussed in the David Mendell book, Obama: From Promise to Power. It is typical of the superficial biographies of Obama now on the market. Secret smoking seems to be Obama's most controversial activity. At best, Mendell and the liberal media describe Obama as "left-leaning."

But you will find it briefly discussed, sort of, in Obama's own book, Dreams From My Father. He writes about "a poet named Frank," who visited them in Hawaii, read poetry, and was full of "hard-earned knowledge" and advice. Who was Frank? Obama only says that he had "some modest notoriety once," was "a contemporary of Richard Wright and Langston Hughes during his years in Chicago..." but was now "pushing eighty." He writes about "Frank and his old Black Power dashiki self" giving him advice before he left for Occidental College in 1979 at the age of 18.

This "Frank" is none other than Frank Marshall Davis, the black communist writer now considered by some to be in the same category of prominence as Maya Angelou and Alice Walker. In the summer/fall 2003 issue of African American Review, James A. Miller of George Washington University reviews a book by John Edgar Tidwell, a professor at the University of Kansas, about Davis's career, and notes, "In Davis's case, his political commitments led him to join the American Communist Party during the middle of World War II-even though he never publicly admitted his Party membership." Tidwell is an expert on the life and writings of Davis.

Is it possible that Obama did not know who Davis was when he wrote his book, Dreams From My Father, first published in 1995? That's not plausible since Obama refers to him as a contemporary of Richard Wright and Langston Hughes and says he saw a book of his black poetry.

The communists knew who "Frank" was, and they know who Obama is. In fact, one academic who travels in communist circles understands the significance of the Davis-Obama relationship.

Professor Gerald Horne, a contributing editor of the Communist Party journal Political Affairs, talked about it during a speech last March at the reception of the Communist Party USA archives at the Tamiment Library at New York University. The remarks are posted online under the headline, "Rethinking the History and Future of the Communist Party."

Horne, a history professor at the University of Houston, noted that Davis, who moved to Honolulu from Kansas in 1948 "at the suggestion of his good friend Paul Robeson," came into contact with Barack Obama and his family and became the young man's mentor, influencing Obama's sense of identity and career moves. Robeson, of course, was the well-known black actor and singer who served as a member of the CPUSA and apologist for the old Soviet Union. Davis had known Robeson from his time in Chicago.

As Horne describes it, Davis "befriended" a "Euro-American family" that had "migrated to Honolulu from Kansas and a young woman from this family eventually had a child with a young student from Kenya East Africa who goes by the name of Barack Obama, who retracing the steps of Davis eventually decamped to Chicago."

It was in Chicago that Obama became a "community organizer" and came into contact with more far-left political forces, including the Democratic Socialists of America, which maintains close ties to European socialist groups and parties through the Socialist International (SI), and two former members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), William Ayers and Carl Davidson.

The SDS laid siege to college campuses across America in the 1960s, mostly in order to protest the Vietnam War, and spawned the terrorist Weather Underground organization. Ayers was a member of the terrorist group and turned himself in to authorities in 1981. He is now a college professor and served with Obama on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago. Davidson is now a figure in the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, an offshoot of the old Moscow-controlled CPUSA, and helped organize the 2002 rally where Obama came out against the Iraq War.

Both communism and socialism trace their roots to Karl Marx, co-author of the Communist Manifesto, who endorsed the first meeting of the Socialist International, then called the "First International." According to Pierre Mauroy, president of the SI from 1992-1996, "It was he [Marx] who formally launched it, gave the inaugural address and devised its structure..."

Apparently unaware that Davis had been publicly named as a CPUSA member, Horne said only that Davis "was certainly in the orbit of the CP [Communist Party]-if not a member..."

In addition to Tidwell's book, Black Moods: Collected Poems of Frank Marshall Davis, confirming Davis's Communist Party membership, another book, The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930-1946, names Davis as one of several black poets who continued to publish in CPUSA-supported publications after the 1939 Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact. The author, James Edward Smethurst, associate professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, says that Davis, however, would later claim that he was "deeply troubled" by the pact.

While blacks such as Richard Wright left the CPUSA, it is not clear if or when Davis ever left the party.

However, Obama writes in Dreams From My Father that he saw "Frank" only a few days before he left Hawaii for college, and that Davis seemed just as radical as ever. Davis called college "An advanced degree in compromise" and warned Obama not to forget his "people" and not to "start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit." Davis also complained about foot problems, the result of "trying to force African feet into European shoes," Obama wrote.

For his part, Horne says that Obama's giving of credit to Davis will be important in history. "At some point in the future, a teacher will add to her syllabus Barack's memoir and instruct her students to read it alongside Frank Marshall Davis' equally affecting memoir, Living the Blues and when that day comes, I'm sure a future student will not only examine critically the Frankenstein monsters that US imperialism created in order to subdue Communist parties but will also be moved to come to this historic and wonderful archive in order to gain insight on what has befallen this complex and intriguing planet on which we reside," he said.

Dr. Kathryn Takara, a professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa who also confirms that Davis is the "Frank" in Obama's book, did her dissertation on Davis and spent much time with him between 1972 until he passed away in 1987.

In an analysis posted online, she notes that Davis, who was a columnist for the Honolulu Record, brought "an acute sense of race relations and class struggle throughout America and the world" and that he openly discussed subjects such as American imperialism, colonialism and exploitation. She described him as a "socialist realist" who attacked the work of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Davis, in his own writings, had said that Robeson and Harry Bridges, the head of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and a secret member of the CPUSA, had suggested that he take a job as a columnist with the Honolulu Record "and see if I could do something for them." The ILWU was organizing workers there and Robeson's contacts were "passed on" to Davis, Takara writes.

Trevor Loudon, the New Zealand-based blogger who has been analyzing the political forces behind Obama and specializes in studying the impact of Marxist and leftist political organizations, notes that Frank Chapman, a CPUSA supporter, has written a letter to the party newspaper hailing the Illinois senator's victory in the Iowa caucuses.

"Obama's victory was more than a progressive move; it was a dialectical leap ushering in a qualitatively new era of struggle," Chapman wrote. "Marx once compared revolutionary struggle with the work of the mole, who sometimes burrows so far beneath the ground that he leaves no trace of his movement on the surface. This is the old revolutionary ‘mole,' not only showing his traces on the surface but also breaking through."

Let's challenge the liberal media to report on this. Will they have the honesty and integrity to do so?

As Sen. John McCain assumes the GOP front-runner mantle, his long-standing, but little-noticed association with donors such as George Soros and Teresa Heinz Kerry is receiving new attention among his Republican critics.

In 2001, McCain founded the Alexandria, Va.-based Reform Institute as a vehicle to receive funding from George Soros' Open Society Institute and Teresa Heinz Kerry's Tides Foundation and several other prominent non-profit organizations.

McCain used the institute to promote his political agenda and provide compensation to key campaign operatives between elections.

In 2006, the Arizona senator was forced to sever his formal ties with the Reform Institute after a controversial $200,000 contribution from Cablevision came to light. McCain solicited the donation for the Reform Institute using his membership on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. In a letter to the Federal Communications Commission, he supported Cablevision's push to introduce the more profitable al la carte pricing, rather than packages of TV programming.

As WND reported, Hernandez serves as a non-paid volunteer for the McCain campaign. A dual Mexican-U.S. citizen, he was a member of former President Vicente Fox's cabinet, representing an estimate 24 million Mexicans living abroad. Hernandez, with a "Mexico first" message, has argued aggressively against building a fence on the Mexican border, insisting the frontier needed to remain wide open so illegal immigrants could easily enter the U.S.

The July 6, 2001, homepage of the Reform Institute archived on the Internet lists founder McCain as chairman of the group's advisory committee.

Prominent senior officials on the McCain 2008 presidential campaign staff found generously paid positions at the Reform Institute following the senator's unsuccessful run for the White House in 2000.

Rick Davis, McCain's current campaign manager, was paid $110,000 a year by the Reform Institute for a consulting position, according to the group's 2003 Form 990 filing with the IRS.

In 2004, Davis advanced to the position of Reform Institute president, with an annual salary of $120,000, according to the group's 2004 Form 990.

In 2005, Davis remained president, but his salary dropped back to $45,000 a year, with a time commitment of five hours per week, according the 2005 Form 990.

Carla Eudy, a senior advisor on McCain's 2008 presidential campaign who until recently headed fundraising, was paid $177,885 in 2005 to serve as the Reform Institute's secretary-treasurer.

Other McCain presidential campaign staffers who have found employment at the Reform Institute include Trevor Potter, McCain's 2000 legal counsel, and Crystal Benton, the senator's former press secretary, who served as institute's communications director in 2005 for an annual salary of $52,083.

The Reform Institute regularly has supported McCain in various legislative efforts, including on campaign finance reform, global warming and "comprehensive immigration reform," all efforts widely opposed by many in the party's conservative base.

Arianna Huffington, syndicated columnist and creator of the HuffingtonPost.com, has served on the Reform Institute's advisory committee since the group's inception.

According to FrontPage Magazine, Teresa Heinz Kerry has provided more than $4 million to the Tides Foundation, a non-profit organization founded by anti-war activist Drummond Pike in 1976 with a history of funding causes such as abortion, homosexual-rights activism and open borders.

Financial contributors while McCain was chairman of the Reform Institute also have included the Educational Foundation of America, a group that supports abortion and opposes drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve.

The Soros-Kerry funding connection with McCain was first exposed by Ed Morrissey at the Captains Quarters blog in 2005.

See also below a link for information on how George Soros is linked to McCain-Feingold legislation attack on free speech. http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=56745

Or see this link to learn more about the connection between a Russian billionaire allied with Putin and alleged ties to Russian organized crime, McCain's campaign manager Rick Davis, and Rick Davis' former position as President of the George Soros-funded Reform Institute. http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=56854